How Does This Work?

Splash works with foreign governments and builds local businesses to create safe water projects, at scale, in resource poor cities. The puzzle pieces already exist. We simply need to reconfigure them to create a more efficient, effective, durable and equitable product.

Intervention

The unique Splash approach brings market-ready solutions to scale—using high quality, durable materials and proven local business models—for a sustainable solution that is locally appropriate. As a whole, the Splash model reflects an integrated view of Water, Hygiene and Sanitation as a three-fold chord to advance health outcomes.

Clean, Safe Water

Splash takes what works for world-class restaurants and hotels—their technology, supply chains and standards—to make the same quality possible for kids living in urban poverty. There is no reason why kids can’t have clean water, other than old economics and assumptions. But the economics and assumptions are changing.

Hygiene Education

Filtration alone can’t stave off water-borne illness. Behavior change is critical. Children learn about personal hygiene. For those lessons to last, we make them locally appropriate—and fun. Splash is seeing kids become empowered to make personal hygiene a positive-peer-pressure priority. Student hygiene clubs are coalescing, and with great impact.

Sustainable Sanitation

While securing clean water, Splash builds relationships with local organizations, businesses and governments to ensure appropriate provision and maintenance of toilets. The bargaining chip of clean water is proving to be quite valuable. When Splash does work that is initially perceived as impossible—cleaning water—then local organizations offer to their part with the possible: sanitation.

Strategy

Splash is proving success via five critical pillars of strategy. With disciplined application, and timely pivoting, Splash is turning a city’s poorest water sources into reliable sources of healthy water. See the five pillars:

1. SPECIFY TARGET POPULATION

A clear, narrow focus is required. For each intervention, we must ask “who will benefit the most—while also making the greatest impact on the larger population?” This question is more relevant today than it ever has been before. Our unceasing attention is on kids living in urban poverty.

2. REPLICATE SUCCESSFUL BUSINESS

We must learn from the best, and do it better. Industry leaders—like McDonalds and Hilton Hotels—already create safe water for customers to drink and use for hygiene in cities worldwide. Splash does the same thing, with the same supply chains, in the same cities—but now for the poorest kids.

3. LEVERAGE EXISTING RESOURCES

We use what’s already there: schools, orphanages, and critical infrastructure. There are excellent institutions serving children already. There is no shortage of skilled labor. So costs are reduced and local solutions strengthened through building partnerships that can last—and employing local talent.

4. PROVE 100% COVERAGE

By proving success-at-scale we compel the attention of both government and entrepreneurs. Splash doesn’t do pilot projects. We show that full coverage can be attained in big cities. When this is proven successful, systemic change can begin in earnest.

5. HAND OVER THE REINS

We begin with the end in mind: a decisive exit strategy. Our true measure of success is when urban water solutions thrive without Splash’s intervention, direction or funding. In the short-term, we co-create local businesses that implement our work. Long-term, these businesses are meant to and will outlive us.

See Global Variables to change this content.

Innovation

Our framework for innovation is clear. And it begins with safe water. Everything we do is built on this foundation. See the visual display of the Splash Innovation Framework here, and let us know what you think!

Outcomes

We have three long-term goals for our work; outcomes we are pushing toward, monitoring against, and which have a fundamental role in shaping our decisions and reactions within all our Programs. The first is better health and development for the children we serve. The second is local ownership. The third, is theft.

Better Health

Clean water is not an end but the means. Our goal is better health and development for the kids we serve. It just makes sense: when kids miss opportunities because they are routinely sick, their potential becomes interrupted and stunted.

Local Ownership

Splash begins with the end in mind: local ownership of solutions. The fundamental commitment of Splash is not to “drop off” or “export” an intervention, but instead to be a catalyst for locally rooted, sustainable solutions. Learn more.

Theft

Our goal is scale. Therefore, we promote theft of the Splash model, including encouraging others to replicate and improve upon it. It is only then that we will have fundamentally changed markets and systems for good.

Transparency

Splash makes a radical and reliable commitment to transparency—showcasing both failure and success—in every aspect of its work. In 2011, Splash rolled out an unprecedented platform for transparent tracking: Proving It.